To read the
major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can't avoid the
impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice
President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the
United States.

Across the board -- from The Washington
Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times
to the New York Post, from NBC's cable networks to the traveling
campaign press corps -- journalists don't even bother to disguise their
contempt for Gore anymore.

At one early Democratic debate, a gathering
of about 300 reporters in a nearby press room hissed and hooted at
Gore's answers. Meanwhile, every perceived Gore misstep, including his
choice of clothing, is treated as a new excuse to put him on a
psychiatrist's couch and find him wanting.

Journalists freely call him "delusional," "a
liar" and "Zelig." Yet, to back up these sweeping denunciations, the
media has relied on a series of distorted quotes and tendentious
interpretations of his words, at times following scripts written by the
national Republican leadership.

In December, for instance, the news media
generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he
discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started
it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle
other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as
some writers put it, told "bold-faced lies."

But behind these examples of Gore's "lies"
was some very sloppy journalism. The Love Canal flap started when The
Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a
key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give
readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national
Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even
after the Post and Times grudgingly filed
corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two
newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively
shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an
Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic
named Bob Somerby. [http://www.dailyhowler.com/]

Though the major media often portrays the
Internet as a bastion for crazed conspiracy theories, the nation's
prestige newspapers appeared to have sunk into their own pattern of
reckless journalism.

The Love Canal quote controversy began on
Nov. 30 when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in
Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to
recognize that individual citizens can effect important
changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl
from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic
waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional
office in the late 1970s.

"I called for a congressional investigation
and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for
other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called
Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee --
that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that
started it all."

After the hearings, Gore said, "we passed a
major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new
efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the
country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And
it all happened because one high school student got
involved."

The context of Gore's comment was clear. What
sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone
-- "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that
started it all."

After learning about the Toone situation,
Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal.
He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal,
which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies
for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post
stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative
twist. "Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to
publicize the dangers of toxic waste," the Post reported. "'I
found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said,
referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of
chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing on this issue.' … Gore
said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the one that started it
all,' he said." [WP, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less
contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started
it all."

The Republican National Committee spotted
Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore
is simply unbelievable -- in the most literal sense of that term,"
declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a
pattern of phoniness -- and it would be funny if it weren't also a
little scary."

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a
bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said,
"I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed
Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day, the key quote had
transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the
one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it
all."

Instead of taking the offensive against these
misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his
meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. But the fun
was just beginning.

The national pundit shows quickly picked up
the story of Gore's new exaggeration.

"Let's talk about the 'love' factor here,"
chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. "Here's the guy who said he
was the character Ryan O'Neal was based on in ‘Love Story.’ … It seems
to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean,
isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be
delusionary?"

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois
Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the
issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would
claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work
on the issue.

"I actually think he's done a great job,"
Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working,
on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to
clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation."
[CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

The next morning, Post political
writer Ceci Connolly highlighted Gore's boast and placed it in his
alleged pattern of falsehoods. "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal
missteps by Vice President Gore," she wrote. "The man who mistakenly
claimed to have inspired the movie 'Love Story' and to have invented the
Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste
site." [WP, Dec. 2, 1999]

That night, CNBC's Hardball returned to
Gore's Love Canal quote by playing the actual clip but altering the
context by starting Gore's comments with the words, "I found a little
town…"

"It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the
Red Baron," laughed Chris Matthews. "I mean how did he get this idea?
Now you've seen Al Gore in action. I know you didn't know that he was
the prototype for Ryan O'Neal's character in ‘Love Story’ or that he
invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love
Canal."

Matthews compared the vice president to
"Zelig," the Woody Allen character whose face appeared at an unlikely
procession of historic events. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps
saying, 'I was the main character in ‘Love Story.’ I invented the
Internet. I invented Love Canal."

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich, who
favors Gore's rival, former Sen. Bill Bradley, added, "I don't know why
he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff
up."

The following day, Rupert Murdoch's New
York Post elaborated on Gore's pathology of deception. "Again, Al
Gore has told a whopper," the Post wrote. "Again, he's been
caught red-handed and again, he has been left sputtering and
apologizing. This time, he falsely took credit for breaking the Love
Canal story. … Yep, another Al Gore bold-faced lie."

The editorial continued: "Al Gore appears to
have as much difficulty telling the truth as his boss, Bill Clinton. But
Gore's lies are not just false, they're outrageously, stupidly false.
It's so easy to determine that he's lying, you have to wonder if he
wants to be found out.

"Does he enjoy the embarrassment? Is he
hell-bent on destroying his own campaign? … Of course, if Al Gore is
determined to turn himself into a national laughingstock, who are we to
stand in his way?"

"Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio
problem," declared former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. "Says
he was the model for 'Love Story,' created the Internet. And this time,
he sort of discovered Love Canal."

A bemused Cokie Roberts chimed in, "Isn't he
saying that he really discovered Love Canal when he had hearings on it
after people had been evacuated?"

"Yeah," added Bill Kristol, editor of
Murdoch's Weekly Standard. Kristol then read Gore's supposed quote: "I
found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I was the
one that started it all." [ABC’s This Week, Dec. 5, 1999]

The Love Canal controversy soon moved beyond
the Washington-New York power axis.

On Dec. 6, The Buffalo News ran an
editorial entitled, "Al Gore in Fantasyland," that echoed the words of
RNC chief Nicholson. It stated, "Never mind that he didn't invent the
Internet, serve as the model for 'Love Story' or blow the whistle on
Love Canal. All of this would be funny if it weren't so
disturbing."

The next day, the right-wing Washington
Times judged Gore crazy. "The real question is how to react to Mr.
Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings," the Times wrote.
"Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusional' thusly: 'The
apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing
external that is actually not present … a belief in something that is
contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or
a mental disorder.'"

The editorial denounced Gore as "a politician
who not only manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his
achievements but appears to actually believe these
confabulations."

But The Washington Times' own
credibility was shaky. For its editorial attack on Gore, the newspaper
not only printed the bogus quote, "I was the one that started it all,"
but attributed the quote to The Associated Press, which had
actually quoted Gore correctly, ("That was the one...").

The Washington Times' challenge to
Gore's sanity also was reminiscent of its 1988 publication of false
rumors that Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had
undergone psychiatric treatment. [As for the Times' insinuations
about Gore's "delusional" behavior, it might be noted that the
newspaper's founder and financial backer, South Korean theocrat Sun
Myung Moon, considers himself the Messiah.]

Yet, while the national media was excoriating
Gore, the Concord students were learning more than they had expected
about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a
correction from The Washington Post and The New York
Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was
insignificant.

"The part that bugs me is the way they nit
pick," said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. "[But] they should at
least get it right." [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal
the jumping off point for a joke list: "Top 10 Achievements Claimed by
Al Gore," the students responded with a press release entitled "Top 10
Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the
Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School." [Boston Globe,
Dec. 26, 1999]

The Web site, The Daily Howler, also
was hectoring what it termed a "grumbling editor" at the Post to
correct the error.

Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's
comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as
the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled
readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: "In fact, Gore
said, 'That was the one that started it all,' referring to the
congressional hearings on the subject that he called."

The revision fit with the Post's
insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but
again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching
"that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the
"that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's
hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times
followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully
explaining Gore's position. "They fixed how they misquoted him, but they
didn't tell the whole story," commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord
High junior.

While the students voiced disillusionment,
the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. "I
really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion,"
said Katharine Seelye of the Times. "It was one word."

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended
her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic
duty. "We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this
[Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit," she said.
[AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

The half-hearted corrections also did not
stop newspapers around the country from continuing to use the bogus
quote.

A Dec. 9 editorial in the Lancaster [Pa.]
New Era even published the polished misquote that the Republican
National Committee had stuck in a press release: "I was the one who
started it all."

The New Era then went on to
psychoanalyze Gore. "Maybe the lying is a symptom of a more
deeply-rooted problem: Al Gore doesn't know who he is," the editorial
stated. "The vice president is a serial prevaricator."

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
writer Michael Ruby concluded that "the Gore of '99" was full of lies.
He "suddenly discovers elastic properties in the truth," Ruby declared.
"He invents the Internet, inspires the fictional hero of 'Love Story,'
blows the whistle on Love Canal. Except he didn't really do any of those
things." [Dec. 12, 1999]

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor
Jr. cited the Love Canal case as proof that President Clinton was a kind
of political toxic waste contaminant. The problem was "the
Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in
fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain.
Gore -- self-described inspiration for the novel Love Story, discoverer
of Love Canal, co-creator of the Internet," Taylor wrote. [National
Journal, Dec. 18, 1999]

On Dec. 19, GOP chairman Nicholson was back
on the offensive. Far from apologizing for the RNC's misquotes,
Nicholson was reprising the allegations of Gore's falsehoods that had
been repeated so often that they had taken on the color of truth:
"Remember, too, that this is the same guy who says he invented the
Internet, inspired Love Story and discovered Love Canal."

More than two weeks after the Post
correction, the bogus quote was still spreading. The Providence
Journal lashed out at Gore in an editorial that reminded readers
that Gore had said about Love Canal, "I was the one that started it
all." The editorial then turned to the bigger picture:

"This is the third time in the last few
months that Mr. Gore has made a categorical assertion that is -- well,
untrue. … There is an audacity about Mr. Gore's howlers that is
stunning. … Perhaps it is time to wonder what it is that impels Vice
President Gore to make such preposterous claims, time and again."
[Providence Journal, Dec. 23, 1999]

On New Year's Eve, a column in The
Washington Times returned again to the theme of Gore's pathological
lies.

Entitled "Liar, Liar; Gore's Pants on Fire,"
the column by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder concluded that "when Al Gore
lies, it's without any apparent reason. Mr. Gore had already established
his credits on environmental issues, for better or worse, and had even
been anointed 'Mr. Ozone.' So why did he have to tell students in
Concord, New Hampshire, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York
called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on the issue. I was the one
that started it all.'" [WT, Dec. 31, 1999]

The characterization of Gore as a clumsy liar
continued into the new year. Again in The Washington Times, R.
Emmett Tyrrell Jr. put Gore's falsehoods in the context of a sinister
strategy:

"Deposit so many deceits and falsehoods on
the public record that the public and the press simply lose interest in
the truth. This, the Democrats thought, was the method behind Mr. Gore's
many brilliantly conceived little lies. Except that Mr. Gore's lies are
not brilliantly conceived. In fact, they are stupid. He gets caught
every time … Just last month, Mr. Gore got caught claiming … to have
been the whistle-blower for 'discovering Love Canal.'" [WT, Jan. 7,
2000]

It was unclear where Tyrrell got the quote,
"discovering Love Canal," since not even the false quotes had put those
words in Gore's mouth. But Tyrrell's description of what he perceived as
Gore's strategy of flooding the public debate with "deceits and
falsehoods" might fit better with what the news media and the
Republicans had been doing to Gore.

Beyond Love Canal, the other prime examples
of Gore's "lies" -- inspiring the male lead in Love Story and
working to create the Internet -- also stemmed from a quarrelsome
reading of his words, followed by exaggeration and ridicule rather than
a fair assessment of how his comments and the truth matched
up.

The earliest of these Gore "lies," dating
back to 1997, was Gore's expressed belief that he and his wife Tipper
had served as models for the lead characters in the sentimental
bestseller and movie, Love Story.

When the author, Erich Segal, was asked about
Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead,
Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard
roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. But Segal said the female lead, Jenny,
was not modeled after Tipper Gore. [NYT, Dec. 14, 1997]

Rather than treating this distinction as a
minor point of legitimate confusion, the news media concluded that Gore
had willfully lied. The media made the case an indictment against Gore’s
honesty.

In doing so, however, the media repeatedly
misstated the facts, insisting that Segal had denied that Gore was the
model for the lead male character. In reality, Segal had confirmed that
Gore was, at least partly, the inspiration for the character, Barrett,
played by Ryan O'Neal.

Some journalists seemed to understand the
nuance but still could not resist denigrating Gore's honesty.

For instance, in its attack on Gore over the
Love Canal quote, the Boston Herald conceded that Gore "did
provide material" for Segal's book, but the newspaper added that it was
"for a minor character." [Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1999] That, of
course, was untrue, since the Barrett character was one of Love
Story's two principal characters

The media's treatment of the Internet comment
followed a similar course. Gore's statement may have been poorly
phrased, but its intent was clear: he was trying to say that he worked
in Congress to help develop the Internet. Gore wasn’t claiming to have
"invented" the Internet or to have been the "father of the Internet," as
many journalists have asserted.

Gore's actual comment, in an interview with
CNN's Wolf Blitzer that aired on March 9, 1999, was as follows: "During
my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in
creating the Internet."

Republicans quickly went to work on Gore's
statement. In press releases, they noted that the precursor of the
Internet, called ARPANET, existed in 1971, a half dozen years before
Gore entered Congress. But ARPANET was a tiny networking of about 30
universities, a far cry from today's "information superhighway,"
ironically a phrase widely credited to Gore.

As the media clamor arose about Gore's
supposed claim that he had invented the Internet, Gore's spokesman Chris
Lehane tried to explain. He noted that Gore "was the leader in Congress
on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what
we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the
Internet that we know today." [AP, March 11, 1999]

There was no disputing Lehane's description
of Gore's lead congressional role in developing today's Internet. But
the media was off and running.

Routinely, the reporters lopped off the
introductory clause "during my service in the United States Congress" or
simply jumped to word substitutions, asserting that Gore claimed that he
"invented" the Internet which carried the notion of a hands-on computer
engineer.

Whatever imprecision may have existed in
Gore's original comment, it paled beside the distortions of what Gore
clearly meant. While excoriating Gore's phrasing as an exaggeration, the
media engaged in its own exaggeration.

Yet, faced with the national media putting a
hostile cast on his Internet statement -- that he was willfully lying --
Gore chose again to express his regret at his choice of
words.

Now, with the Love Canal controversy, this
media pattern of distortion has returned with a vengeance. The national
news media has put a false quote into Gore's mouth and then extrapolated
from it to the point of questioning his sanity. Even after the quote was
acknowledged to be wrong, the words continued to be repeated, again
becoming part of Gore's record.

From the media’s hostile tone, one might
conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore
should be disqualified from the campaign.

At times, the media has jettisoned any
pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first
Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they
sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on
television.

Several journalists later described the
incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The
Daily Howler observed, Time's Eric Pooley cited the
reporters' reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his
"frenzied attempt to connect."

"The ache was unmistakable -- and even
touching -- but the 300 media types watching in the press room at
Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed
out by it," Pooley wrote. "Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room
erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers
cutting down some hapless nerd."

Hotline's Howard Mortman described the same
behavior as the reporters "groaned, laughed and howled" at Gore's
comments.

Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN's
Washington Journal, Salon's Jake Tapper cited the Hanover
incident, too. "I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected
in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill
Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at
Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only
time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any
party at any event." [See The Daily Howler,http://www.dailyhowler.com/, Dec.
14, 1999]

Traditionally, journalists pride themselves
in maintaining deadpan expressions in such public settings, at most
chuckling at a comment or raising an eyebrow, but never demonstrating
derision for a public figure.

Reasons for this widespread media contempt
for Gore vary. Conservative outlets, such as Rev. Moon's Washington
Times and Murdoch's media empire, clearly want to ensure the
election of a Republican conservative to the White House. They are
always eager to advance that cause.

In the mainstream press, many reporters may
feel that savaging Gore protects them from the "liberal" label that can
so damage a reporter's career. Others simply might be venting residual
anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
They might believe that Gore's political destruction would be a fitting
end to the Clinton administration.

Reporters apparently sense, too, that there
is no career danger in showing open hostility toward Clinton's vice
president.

Yet, the national media's prejudice against
Gore -- now including fabrication of damaging quotes and
misrepresentation of his meaning -- raises a troubling question about
this year's election and the future health of American
democracy:

How can voters have any hope of expressing an
informed judgment when the media intervenes to transform one of the
principal candidates -- an individual who, by all accounts, is a
well-qualified public official and a decent family man -- into a
national laughingstock?

What hope does American democracy have when
the media can misrepresent a candidate’s words so thoroughly that they
become an argument for his mental instability -- and all the candidate
feels he can do about the misquotes is to apologize?

As The Daily Howler's Somerby
observes, the concern about deception and its corrosive effect on
democracy dates back to the ancient Greeks.